End of Anti-Americanism?

MEXICO CITY — Cuba has been the epicenter of anti-Americanism in modern Latin America. As a political ideology it was born during the Spanish-American War of 1898, reached its height with the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and may now, through a singularly courageous move by President Obama, have begun its final decline.

The agreement to re-establish diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba will face serious problems: the opposition of conservative American legislators, as well as a tortuous path toward civil and political liberties in Cuba(the recent detention of bloggers trying to expand the range of free speech in Cuba is a bad omen). But acclaim for the agreement is widespread in Latin America. By his historic announcement on Dec. 17, Obama has begun to dismantle one of the most deeply rooted ideological passions of the southern continent.

At its distant origins, anti-Americanism had a religious character: a defensive fear on the part of conservative groups and the Catholic Church directed against the penetration of Protestant belief and culture. For Mexico there was the added offense of the 1846-48 American war of territorial aggrandizement. Nevertheless, the Liberals who governed Mexico in the latter half of the 19th century retained an admiration for the United States. Their republican and democratic ideas were stronger than their nationalist sentiments. Something of the same nature was true among progressive elites throughout the continent.

But the war of 1898 united the countries of Hispanic America against the United States and basically reconciled them with Spain, from which they had — Cuba was one exception — won their independence. As a result of that war, Latin American liberals experienced something similar to many Marxists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They felt like orphans, while various American writers and intellectuals (like Mark Twain and William James) recognized an irresolvable contradiction between the democratic values on which the United States was founded and the now explicit intentions (as Henry Cabot Lodge said in 1895) that “from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean there should be but one flag and one country.”

Many saw the independence of Cuba secured by the war as merely the conversion of a Spanish colony into an American possession. And it was then that the liberals of Latin America began to converge with Catholics, other conservative groups and socialists in forming a Latin American nationalism centered on militant opposition to the United States.

Between 1898 and 1959, with some exceptions, the political, diplomatic and military balance sheet of the United States in Latin America was nothing short of disastrous. In 1913, the American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson plotted with Mexican conservatives to overthrow (and eventually murder) Francisco I. Madero, the first democratically elected president of Mexico, a grim episode that foreshadowed other abuses: landings of the Marines, occupation of territory, support for military coups, and the insistent presence of huge American corporations. In the United States, diplomacy to further the interests of major businesses was seen as normal; to Latin Americans it was an intolerable display of greed.

The region reacted with a surge of nationalism, which the conservative American presidents of the period between the world wars treated as a harbinger of communism. Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his Good Neighbor Policy, somewhat corrected the mistaken direction of his predecessors by accepting the Mexican nationalization of its oil resources. But in Cuba, the connections between politics and American business interests remained unbroken and in plain sight. (Indeed, during World War II, Pan-American cooperation with the United States seemed to have its most fertile moment — with the prominent exception of Argentina.)

At the beginning of the Cold War, many Latin American thinkers attributed much of the region’s poverty and inequality to the presence of American interests and saw socialism, expressed in various Marxist varieties, as a legitimate alternative. The United States continued to support authoritarian dictatorships, like the Somoza family business in Nicaragua. America’s claim to be a fount of democratic values lost its credibility.

In 1947, the liberal Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas predicted: “Latin America will seethe with unrest and ... they will be capable of anything, of sheltering and supporting the enemies of the United States and themselves becoming the most bitter of its possible enemies. And then there will be no way to subdue them, or even to frighten them.”

The Cuban Revolution fulfilled this prophecy and opened a new cycle of intense anti-Americanism. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and the conciliatory moves of Jimmy Carter could not counterbalance the bitterness provoked by Republican administrations. C.I.A. involvement in the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the crimes of the Reagan administration in the “dirty wars” of Central America incited generations of young Latin Americans to emulate Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The ideological hatred of “Yankee imperialism” became standard in many universities. The rage thus engendered was the most effective weapon of survival for the repressive and dictatorial Cuban regime.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and, surprisingly, democratic governments came to power through the ballot box in various Latin American battlegrounds, notably Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Marxists were orphaned by ideology, and space was opened for liberal and social-democratic governments.

Anti-Americanism in the region will never disappear, but it is going out of fashion — and Obama’s decision will certainly further its demise. It had been artificially maintained by the incendiary histrionics of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But it has become more difficult to mask the anachronism of Chavista discourse, directed against the “empire” that is the principal client for Venezuela’s oil. Only the great obstacle of the American boycott of Cuba has remained as an outmoded and divisive force.

In re-establishing relations with Cuba, the United States renounces its “imperial destiny” and recovers much of the moral legitimacy needed to uphold the democratic values that led to its foundation (and also of the countries of Latin America). Obama’s action is meant for the good of all the Americas, including the United States. And freedom of expression in Cuba is an absolute necessity for its success. No people or country is an island unto itself. The Castro dynasty has kept Cuba as such for 56 years.

Enrique Krauzeis a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.